Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his
faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him
all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But any one who
wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of
any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one most striking and determining element in the question—
Browning’s simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was one of a generation of great men, of great
men who had a certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold,
were alike in being children of a very strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness and air of
deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of
other influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without the least affectation, all the influences of
his day. A very interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure in a university dinner. "Praise," he says
in effect, "was given very deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of Oxford men, Clough." The
really striking thing about these three names is the fact that they are united in Browning’s praise in a way in which they
are by no means united in each other’s. Matthew Arnold, in one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo–
Shelley," who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on
the other hand, has summarised Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:—
"There was a bad poet named Clough,
Whom his friends all united to puff.
But the public, though dull,
Has not quite such a skull
As belongs to believers in Clough."
The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning’s life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and
also Carlyle who sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled against Mill. He excused
Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of great men who all
contemned each other. To say that he had no streak of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no
justification for attributing any of these great men’s opinions to envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a
certain spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He admired another poet as he admired a
fading sunset or a chance spring leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in that department
than whether he could be redder than the sunset or greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in
the literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit
Browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had been greatly and justifiably struck with
the work of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett.
That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of
poetry to its very weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too
heady and too high–coloured. When she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a straining after
violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days
of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described
as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and of brazen paradox and antithesis. We
find this hot wit, as distinct from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare. We find
it lingering in Hudibras, and we do not find it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of Elizabeth
Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:—
"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—sooth,
But glittered dew–like in the covenanted
And high–rayed light. He was a despot—granted,
But the αὐτός of his autocratic mouth
Said 'Yea' i' the people’s French! He magnified
The image of the freedom he denied."
Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes
as winking at the Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous: but to take this step one must
reach the sublime. Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then urgently needed assertion, the fact that
womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. Her verse at its best was
quite as strong as Browning’s own, and very nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a difference
between two primary colours, not between dark and light shades of the same colour.
Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private life of this lady from his father’s friend Kenyon. The
old man, who was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for establishing definite relationships with
people after a comparatively short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy godfather." He spoke
much about her to Browning, and of Browning to her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. And
there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the
position of Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique kind, and living beyond all question
under very unique circumstances.
Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious
coincidence, had borne a part in the same social system which stung Browning’s father into revolt and renunciation. The
parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was a
man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and endowed with some faculties for
making his conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was
rigidly upright and responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But selfishness of the most perilous sort, an
unconscious selfishness, was eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of all despots. His most
fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as
oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst
spirit of egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill–temper, but that spirit
which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must be absolutely at his beck and call,
whether it was to be brow–beaten or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett’s life, the family had lived in
the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again
until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak,
and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and
courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards
happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to
be only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important
place than has hitherto been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street; and his own
character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter’s sickbed in a manner
compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross
two rooms to her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed
solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all atmospheres—a
medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of
disease. A man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded,
the three hours as exceptional and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household was the curse of
considering ill–health the natural condition of a human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally
and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his daughter’s decline. He did not know this, but it was so.
Scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat for which he hungered; and when the
cloud was upon his spirit, he would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty of the sentimentalist.
It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable violence and
more intolerable tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer. It is evident that she practically
believed herself to be dying. But she was a high–spirited woman, full of that silent and quite unfathomable kind of
courage which is only found in women, and she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of life. Silent
rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a spirit
which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was
impatience, "tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of books before she had read them was,
she said, incurable with her. It is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the achievement of this woman,
who thus contrived, while possessing all the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.
Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in
contact with her. In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic
gestures that it must be grown again "that minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open parcels.
Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire."
She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and
strenuous sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments almost as colourless as the
monotony they relieved, nor were they coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she
breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly
with her blind friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical
interest in great public questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but it does not appear that she
felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt an attraction,
which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. In
1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it
to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination and found the door barred
against him. In that phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained inside the resolute
man of the world into which he was to all external appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with charming
sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely self–revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else
to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the
rest of her life if their relations had always remained a learned and delightful correspondence. But she must have known
very little of Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy and bloodless tie. At all times of his life
he was sufficiently fond of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great
love for seeing and hearing and feeling people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him slap men on
the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not
long begun when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the Barrett household, that he
should come and call on her as he would on any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and doubt.
She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If
my truest heart’s wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do."
Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has within comparatively recent years been placed
before the world. It is a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many profound questions.
It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and
amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at least a word about the moral
question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of the present
writer the whole of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am
not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to be known.
That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a
principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a cavern, and the
word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any
similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can
imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it was that Dante made a new heaven and
a new hell out of a girl’s nod in the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation by keeping an ethical
diary. But the one essential which exists in all such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can make
the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains
expressions which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom they were addressed, and an
entirely different value and significance when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of sanctity does
arise. It is not because there is anything in this world too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things
in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to the world the inmost core of his affection for his
wife, I see no reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My dear Ba," is that they do not convey
anything of the sort. As far as any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been expressing the most
noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, in
short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.
Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a selection among the Letters, but not a selection which
should exclude anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. Browning had not desired any
people to know that they were fond of each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" or "The
Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been married in a public church, for every one who is married
in a church does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea
that such confessions are too sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should have no noble
passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little
actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of
the English Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language dignified and deliberately intended to be
understood by all. If the bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were to utter a poem
compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a
lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal
portions of those Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and unmeaning it is difficult to
understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we
love.
There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends to make their publication far less open to objection
than almost any other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary sentimentalist who delights in the
most emotional of magazine interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, because he and many
persons more acute will be quite unable to make head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the most
extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only two main rules for this form of letter–writing: the first
is, that if a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the second is, that if you have written from a
third to half of a sentence you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to watch any one who felt an
idle curiosity as to the language and secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come upon
some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules
for you, before I shot down your dogs… But not being Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I
might go modestly on…ὦμoι, let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles."
What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain
conclusion which appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one—that Browning was in the habit of
taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. Nor
will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great
central idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies
in a letter following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean to say you would show me…Can it be? or
am I reading this 'Attic contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the difference between flattering myself
and being flattered…the fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too overjoyed to have revelations
from the Portfolio…however incarnated with blots and pen scratches…to be able to ask impudently of them now? Is that
plain?" Most probably she thought it was.
With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively natural and appropriate. Browning’s prose was in
any case the most roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would often send an urgent telegram
from which it was absolutely impossible to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its object.
This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the theory of Browning’s intellectual conceit. A man would have to be
somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication
to the dislocation of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of his brain that things came out of it,
as it were, backwards. The words "tail foremost" express Browning’s style with something more than a conventional
accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of
Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes
it for his head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical utterances, more or less incapable of telling a
story without telling the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian secret society, one local branch of
which bore as a badge an olive–green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational interview tried to bribe or
blackmail him, he would have told the story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been incapable of
beginning with anything except the question of the colour of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and
life upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of his description of Hercules the foot appears
some sizes larger than the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have written his love letters
obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it is
somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of
humour, which does not easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under the influence of her own quality
of passionate ingenuity or emotional wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and she was
partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort
which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still
remain private. They write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist language, a
language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation.
Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always
used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together. I hope they understand
each other—nobody else would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage. Their common affection
for Kenyon was a great element in their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory to account for Mr.
Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his otherwise unaccountable kindness to me.""For Mr. Kenyon’s kindness,"
retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with mesmerism for that reason." There is something very
dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old
dilettante, of whom the world would never have heard but for them. Browning’s feeling for him was indeed especially
strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most splendid
men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large–hearted and benevolent, that he
deserves to be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is something thoroughly worthy of Browning
at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the
heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in Kenyon a kind
of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that
he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able.
Browning’s desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as has been stated, with a variety of objections. The
chief of these was the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing, a point on which the
seeker for an interview might be permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me.—I
never learned to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and
others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and
so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and dark." The substance of Browning’s
reply was to the effect, "I will call at two on Tuesday."
They met on May 20, 1845. A short